Yet another week-end full of videogames, junk food and drinks, with a bunch of friends (some of them even managed to be virtually here).



Meanwhile, some parcels were waiting for me at home. First, a bare PCB for my yet-to-come Atari 2600 Flashcart :




Then, a Megadrive clone I ordered from Play-Asia. This one features a cartridge connector, in addition to the set of built-in games you usually find in this kind of devices.




As you can see, the device is rather small. The bundled 6-buttons pads are OK, and it also features a PAL/NTSC switch. I still haven't played much with it, but it looks fine.

This year's Infoticaires meeting was very nice, as usual. I had no luck with my own stuff (my "generic linker" stopped working after a few hours), but there were so many things to do and people to talk with that it didn't matter anyway ;)

Click here for a video of this event.

I double-triple-checked my board, in order to sort out the issues I talked about in my previous post, but everything looked correct at the hardware level so far... krb then suggested to chat with some people in the PCE homebrew scene, and the well-known hacker Charles MacDonald explained me the weird ROM layout when it comes to games larger than 256Kb. After some attempts, I patched my flash programming software to take care of this layout, and it works !

Here you can see Bomberman '93 running fine on a SuperGrafx. Thank you Pascal and Charles for your help ;)

I recycled my "Generic USB Linker" gizmo to make a Flash cart for PC Engine consoles.
I etched a PCB having roughly the size of a HuCard, and connected it to my flash board, and it works... almost. For some reason, on the ROM I've tested, some sprites are garbage, but the reamining sprites/backgrounds are OK, music and SFX work too, as well as the game itself. Weird. Well it's enough for today, I'll have a look at these issues later ;)

Here is a picture for now (click on it to get a full-sized one).

Just a small picture of something I'm currently working on...



More on that later... For this one, I will have the PCB manufactured.

I've managed to fully assemble my flash cart yesterday, and connected it in place of a SNES cartridge Mask ROM.

Guess what ? It's working ;)



On the left side of the picture is the flash cart connected to a SNES cartridge. On the right side, you can find the programmer board, that allows programming of the flash cart with a PC, via an USB cable.

Well, that's already a good start. SNES is just one of many targets this flash cart could be used on. Stay tuned for further updates ;)

It's been some time since my last update... Spare time is hard to find when you have two little kids to take care of ;)

Anyway, I've been working these last weeks on a "Generic" linker for old cartridge-based systems. The principle is to use 2 boards : one "motherboard" containing some flash memory, as well as the required stuff to write to this flash via USB, and a "daughter board", that contains system-specific logic.

As I decided to build the PCB myself, I splitted the "motherboard" into 2 boards : one containing the flash memory, the other being the USB flash programmer. I used a PIC18F4550 as the main chip of the programmer board. Here are some pictures of the programmer board, linked to the (partially assembled) flash memory board.



As you can see on the flash memory board, I had to correct some shortcuts by hand. I need to perform a full check of both boards now, then I'll work on the software side, and see if eveything works fine.

Some thoughts about this project :

• Instead of building 2 boards "by hand", I should have had the PCB built by some PCB house. Those are cheap nowadays, and it would have saved me the hassle of this 40-pin header soldering, and PCB tracks correction and such, since I would have been able to put both the programmer stuff and the memory on the same board.
• My programmer board needs a full redesign. My choices weren't wise as the time, and the consequence is that the programming phase will be way too slow. Anyway it should be sufficient for a "proof-of-concept".

Thomas is born on March 19th. He's a nice little boy of 4Kg210 and 55cm. His older brother, my wife and I are very happy ;)

These last months (years, even), I have done much hardware-related stuff, but close to nothing on the software side, especially for the GBA which is a shame, as GBA development has been my main reason for setting up this website.

More than 2 years after my latest software release for the GBA, here is CCCP, which stands for Crystal Clear Clone for Portable (devices).



The original Crystal Clear game can be found here. This game is my wife's current favorite online game, especially for the multiplayer version she's playing to every day ;)

It has been an opportunity to use latest builds of DevkitARM and libgba that can be found here. Compared to the tools available some years ago, it's a huge improvement. Coding for GBA has never been easier, and I'm quite satisfied with what I've done with their help in about one week : a GBA project in C++, with sound, support for loading/saving, etc.

You can download the ROM here.

Happy new year !

2oo7 has been quite a good year for me, and I hope 2oo8 will be as nice. My wife and I are expecting a new kid (another little boy) to born in March, so it will be my main concern for this year at least ;) However, I hope to find some time to work on electronics, mainly FPGA-related stuff.

I have purchased a Terasic DE1 board, also known as Altera Cyclone II starter board. This board features almost anything I need for my projects about emulation of old computers and videogame consoles. This board has already been succesfully used on "larger" designs, such as the Minimig project (Amiga 500 in a FPGA), and there are many systems in the 16-bit era that I would like to have a look at...

Stay tuned ;)

I added a PS/2 keyboard interface to the system, which makes it possible to play a bit with the Basic.
Fabrice Frances also provided me a modified ROM that is able to somewhat "resume" the execution of the system, from a memory dump that can be done from his well-known emulator, Euphoric. So I designed a memory loader, that downloads the contents from such a dump into memory, with the help of a FTDI USB module. First results look nice :)

EDIT : DBug gave me some tips to fix the .TAP files header (disabling the autostart) and retreive information from it (like the start address). It means that along with Fabrice's ROM, it now brings a great testing solution :) Here you can see some of his demos running.

I managed to fix some bugs in the ULA, and now it displays the Basic welcome screen correctly. The cursor also blinks like it was supposed to do.



The "key pressed forever" issue was due to the PB3 input of the VIA that was incorrectly held high.
Next thing to do, add a PS/2 keyboard interface ;)

The project of emulating an Oric-1 in a FPGA is something I started some months ago... until my interest in doing such a thing faded a bit...
Fortunately, mostly because of the (then upcoming) Alchimie 7 party, I went back to this project. I didn't manage to have something working (at least showing some stuff on a TV) during this party, but I worked a bit on it, and managed to get some results in simulation.

Now, after a few days worth of work, here is a first version on the "Oric-on-a-chip" booting the Oric Atmos ROM :)



You may notice some issues here : the first line is not what it is expected to be, and for some reason, it acts like the * keyboard key is pressed forever. But well, that's a good start anyway.
For the moment, there is no PSG implementation at all, and I guess the VIA and ULA code need some rework too :)

More to come soon, hopefully :)

My wife and I went to Alchimie 7 party. As usual it was a great party, with lots of geeks and a top-notch organization.

Here is what the event looks like :



I made a small conference entitled "Emulation with a FPGA", mostly based on my work on the emulation of the Thomson MO5 in a FPGA.



As I was here for the 3 days that lasted this event, I spent some time working on a project I started some months ago. I didn't manage to do all the stuff I wanted to do on it, but some progress has been made.



This last picture should be enough for some people to understand what I'm currently working on... Hopefully, I would be able to show more in a few. Stay tuned !

This year's VieuMikro meeting, organized by Silicium stood on October 13th and 14th.
Like all people attending this retro-computing meeting, I had a great time.

Here is a small picture of the event :


My own stuff :


I managed to test the HxC Floppy Drive Emulator on an Amstrad CPC 6128. It works flawlessly, adding therefore Amstrad computers to the large list of supported machines :)


See this forum thread for more pictures and comments. Among quite unusual machines (and people :P), stamba demonstrated an impressive set of electronic music stuff, many of them based on the Commodore 64 and various music peripherals.

Next week, I will go to the Alchimie 7 meeting, with hopefully many things to come. Stay tuned!